A 21st century person’s guide to wordsmithery

How Not To Writte… A 21st century person’s guide to wordsmithery

Words are a bit of a bugger, aren’t they.

We’re surrounded by words all day, every day. They tell us what to buy, what to think, how to feel and even help us to tell an office co-worker to stop using our organic unsweetened soya milk. We put them into sentences and paragraphs in a hopefully pleasing order and spend hours reading the words that people have sent to us… and then replying.

And yet, very few of us think we’re ‘a good writer’. Most of us probably don’t think we’re a writer at all. We’d probably scoff at anyone who said ‘Hey, you know what, actually you ARE a writer’.

Feel free to take a while to really scoff loudly at this point (You can even look over your glasses at us with haughty disdain and try the snort of disbelief). Have a bit of a tut too, if you want. Let it out. Come to terms with the truth.

Done that? Good.
So, there you have it. We’re all writers now.

Whether you’re updating your Facebook status, filling your CV with proactive-sounding lies about your ‘business skillset’, or leaving a romantic message for a loved one on a scrappy Post-it note, you’re a writer.

That’s the good news. Hurray! Group hug/firm handshake/your choice of exuberant expression of happiness etc. But, brace yourself, there’s some bad news around the corner…

The bad news

You might be a TERRIBLE writer. Repetitive, dull, formulaic and utterly, utterly dreadful. But it’s not your fault – we’re all terrible writers these days, mainly because we’ve never been taught properly how to use those tricky nouns, verbs and adjectives to truly express our own deeply personal feelings, thoughts and ideas.

We’re taught to conform to a certain way of writing when, in fact, we should all sound different – we’re all unique on the inside, so why should our writing sound the same on the outside? [Editor: A good question, I’m glad you asked that. Writer: Thanks, Ed…have you lost weight? Editor: Shush, you, you’ll make me blush].

So how do you become a better writer?

*drumroll + fanfare + sound of the Red Arrows flying past*

START READING THIS BLOG!!

Sharpening your word skills

‘How Not To Writte’ is the modern writer’s salvation* (possibly). We’re going to take your limp prose, your predictable business emails and your dull-as-dishwater social media updates and help you avoid the common pitfalls and writing traps.

– We’re going to tell you the ‘Dos’ – the positive, brilliant and exceptionally sexy things you can do to make your writing more engaging, truthful and original.

– And we’re going to tell you the ‘Don’ts’ – the dumb mistakes, the unnecessary waffle and the turgid old guidelines from the school rulebook that you can rip up and forget.

It’s not a foolproof system (we’re not perfect writers ourselves, of course, one of us even used the phrase ‘diversifying our demographic’ before being promptly walloped with a whitebait. It’s ok, we’re not usually violent). But by dipping into these blog posts and taking away some of those all-important Dos and Don’ts, we’re confident you’ll start seeing an improvement in your writing and communication skills.*

Get ready to improve your wordsmithery

So, brace yourself, gird your loins (whatever that means) and get ready to dive into How Not To Writte. It’s packed full of writing advice to turn you into the writer you’ve always wanted to be.

Off you go then… trot along (or gallop, or canter, or whatever horsey preference of movement you’d like to undertake to hot hoof it over to a blog, with some words in it)…